Fuck You, Dick Cheney

One more reason to hate Dick Cheney (as if I needed more). I was driving back to work after my eye appointment this afternoon when traffic came to a complete stop on 494. I could see up ahead the rode was bare after a certain point. As it became clear that we were stuck on the bridge (over the river), heading west, just before the airport, people started getting out of their cars and chatting. I looked around a bit and I could see police cars’ lights up ahead. It seemed they had cordoned off the whole lane (the other lane was unencumbered).

I started chatting with a middle-aged guy with a cellphone. He told me his buddy said it was Air Force One (or Two or whatever) and that Dick Cheney was in town. This idea was corroborated by other fellow travelers. So basically, Dick Cheney shut down one of the largest freeways in the state for 20 or 30 minutes so that his motorcade could travel unmolested by traffic. Allow me to recap:

Fuck you, Dick Cheney. Fuck You.

How about traveling on the same roads as the rest of us? Here’s an idea: maybe you shouldn’t take a huge motorcade with a limo everywhere! Maybe nobody would notice if you drove around in an old Pinto. But no. Dick Cheney has to emerge from his secure location to lord over the rest of us and show off just how powerful he is. He can shut down a highway, with cars backed up for miles, while he gets his ass chauffeured whereever he wants to go. I’m sure he’s not even driving, so what’s the big deal if there’s traffic? I can’t understand it as anything other than a powerplay on his part. It’s so typical of him to inconvenience thousands of people for nothing.

Granted, this is far from the worst thing he’s done, but it affected me, so it’s on my mind. And it just happened like 30 minutes ago. This is some seriously up-to-the-minute blogging here.

My only regret is that I couldn’t catch up to his motorcade to flip him off as I drove past him at 90 miles an hour, late for work. Fuck you, Cheney.

Update: Here’s a link to the Trib story about Cheney’s arrival.

A government source has informed ABC News that the government is spying on the phone records of journalists at ABC News, along with the NY Times and Washington Post.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Our reports on the CIA’s secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.

So, what kind of government spies on journalists in an effort to conceal their own abuses of power? That’s right kids: A neo-fascist government. The CIA leak investigation mentioned above is not Plamegate, but the leak concerning the secret (illegal) CIA prisons abroad. Instead of cleaning house and getting within the law the CIA has decided to harrass the people who exposed their law-breaking. You know you’ve got problems when you have unrepentant criminals at every level within the ruling administration. These people don’t give a fuck about the law. They consider themselves above the law. The law is for peasants, like you and me.

We’ve got some serious problems in this country, and this story is just a taste. We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis and the only acceptable solution is the impeachment of Bush, Cheney and all of their collaborators. There are so many widening scandals it’s hard to know which way investigators will go. One thing is for sure; this administration must be held accountable for its crimes.

Stop harrassing journalists! Stop spying on Americans! Stop waging war in Iraq!

Will they listen? Of course not. That’s why we the people have to take the power back. A government that doesn’t listen to its citizens does not qualify as a democracy. Bush seems to think that after his supposed re-election in ’04 that he doesn’t have to take any shit from anybody. I got news for ya, Bushie: The people are the rulers here. This is America, dammit. We are in charge, not you. We are the government, not you. You are just a custodian, and we don’t appreciate your arrogance or your contempt for the law and the will of the people. Your time in office is nearing an end, far more quickly than you imagine.

To all the real (i.e. “not on the government payroll”) journalists out there: keep up the good work. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let your own news organizations silence you either. The truth is more frightening than most Americans could possibly imagine at this point, but that very fact is the reason why you must not stop digging and reporting until the truth is revealed. If you’re running into problems getting the story out, make sure you harness the power of blogs. I’ll publish anything you got.

Leonardo

Da Vinci, that is. Pretty cool guy.

Shout out

This is a shout-out to all the moms out there. Be real! Yeah.

What can I say about moms that hasn’t been said? I just gotta appreciate mine. Hope everybody out there got to see or talk to yer moms today.

Peace.

Happy Mother's Day

Time to buy some flowers and head out to eat with the family. Hope everyone has a good one.

Karl Rove Facing Indictment Next Week?

It sure looks like it.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

If this is true, it is huge news. I haven’t found anything in the mainstream media news sources yet. I’m not sure if this FatCats site is reputable or not; we’ll have to wait for confirmation. Here it is from the source, t r u t h o u t. Didn’t expect this to come on a Saturday night…

Looks like they’re not sure what Rove will be charged with, however:

It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge. Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.

Throw the book at him.

Comments

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention: You can post comments now!!

Holy shit! That’s cool, and yet another advantage to going this route. So post away people and let me know what you think of the new format.

Ha! I’m posting again! Just minutes after my last post. So cool…

Anyway, it looks like Cheney may have been the man with the plan when it comes to outing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent. From the Washington Post:

A court filing last month by Fitzgerald — who has been gradually spelling out what he plans to say during Libby’s trial next year — stated that Cheney had expressed concern about whether Wilson’s trip was a junket set up by his wife. The new filing includes the precise annotations that Cheney wrote on a copy of Wilson’s July 2003 article in the New York Times, titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

“Have they done this sort of thing before?” Cheney wrote. “Send an amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”

Fitzgerald’s filing states that Libby learned of Plame’s name from Cheney, in the course of discussions by the vice president’s office about how to respond to a June 2003 inquiry from Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus about Wilson’s trip to Niger. Fitzgerald asserts that those conversations — and earlier ones sparked by a May 2003 column about the trip in the Times — help demonstrate that Libby’s “disclosures to the press concerning Mr. Wilson’s wife were not casual disclosures.”

This doesn’t look good for Dick, who could be in hot water if Libby squeals on him and claims that Cheney was the impetus behind the leak. It certainly seems logical to me that Libby (Cheney’s good friend and ex-chief of staff) would follow up on ideas Cheney had for responding to their detractors.

There’s so many things to impeach Bush and Cheney for, it’s hard to pick a favorite. I’d have to say that Plamegate and the NSA Wiretapping Scandal are definitely contenders, but the whole War in Iraq is a excellent argument for impeachment in my opinion. There seems to be Americans and Iraqis dying at a steady rate, with the Iraqis dying in far greater numbers. I hope that oil is worth it. Peak Oil or not, it’s time to get Bush and Co. out of the White House before they do any more damage.

Yep, this is an all-new design and now it’s finally live. I’ve even migrated all my old posts over to the new system. Obsessive? Yes, but it was pretty easy. They go all the way back to 2002, but I’ve only been posting on blogger.com for the last month or so. And as you can see, some of those posts were test posts.

I hope to update this blog a lot more often than I did before. After all, I now use a system that is infinitely easier to update. Before, posting was a nightmare. Dreamweaver didn’t like my design and was constantly freezing up when I was typing. This is so much better. Who knew there was actually a point to “blog software.” I think I thought I was a tough-guy, a real hard-core web designer, who does things my way or not at all. Well, it turns out that my way is kinda hard. So, even though I have a little less control over the design of this blog, I hope my increased post-frequency makes up for it. We shall see.

Hell, I can do another post, right after this one! Muhahahaaa! It’s easy! I can organize my thoughts into coherant posts without screwing around with the HTML! This is sweet.

Here's another new post

Another test post. This might get its ass deleted later. For now, I’m still working on formatting and I wanna see how multiple posts looks on the new blog. So, do you like the new header? Fucking sweet, right? Well, I made it myself. I should’ve been sleeping.

Look out, Iran. GW's crazy

Listening to: Paul Oakenfold – Nixon’s Spirit (feat. Hunter S. Thompson)

These Bush cabal fuckers are crazy, man. Iraq is a fucking debacle and planning is well under way for part 2: Iran. It’s bigger, badder and much more challenging than the original. This sequel will be the beginning of the end of our little blue planet should we choose this course.

Listening to: Bee Gees – Stayin’ Alive

Okay, this is getting creepy. I’m not choosing these songs; they’re popping up on my randomized iTunes player.

Anyway, seriously. We need to step back from the edge. Attacking Iran is crazy. These guys are probably the most powerful nation in the middle east and their fanatic nutjobs, just like Bush & company. That would be a bad combination.

Are you aware of the high-level planning for a war in Iran, with war games to that effect? Here’s a snippet from War and Piece:

The public needs to know first, that this planning includes preemptive plans that the President could approve and implement with 12 hours notice. Congress should take notice of the fact that there is a real war plan — CONPLAN 8022 — and it could be implemented tomorrow.

Second, the public needs to know that the train has left the station on bigger war planning, that a ground war — despite the Post claim yesterday that a land invasion ‘is not contemplated’ — is also being prepared. It is a real war plan; I’ve heard CONPLAN 1025.

Like early 2002, the floodgates have opened and the stories about Iran war planning have started. Some claim Dick Cheney has already made the decision, some claim war this spring, some say the U.S. and Israel are collaborating.

Listening to: Johnny Cash – Meet Me In Heaven

Okay, this is officially scary. WTF?

I had to check the next song. It’s Skid Row. I’m gettin’ outa here.

Welcome to my new blog

I’ve ditched the old design and moved on to this one, hosted by Blogger. I figure this way I will be able to update it a lot more. It was a difficult and time-consuming process before, partly because of Dreamweaver’s quirks and partly because of my insane design. I’m trying to tone down the obvious insanity this time, although it may crop up later.

Oh and feel free to let me know how it looks. Now you can comment on this blog (and this story), which is a feature my old solution was missing. Hope you like it!